on barbaric and medieval imagination and intellect. Christianity, like the eagle wounded by an arrow which a feather of its own had winged, is to-day attacked by social and physical theories which claim to rule a wider empire of time and space; but at the Christianising of Europe, this majestic world-religion must have opened up such visions of human unity as the barbarians would have needed centuries of internal conflict, civilisation, and philosophy to approximate. To the Europe of the barbarian hordes Christianity came as a ready-made philosophy—a philosophy, moreover, not too refined to touch certain deep feelings of clan life; indeed, two leading conceptions of the new faith were identical with conceptions long familiar to such life, viz. inherited sin and vicarious punishment. So far as these doctrines were concerned, Christianity did not introduce new ideas; it simply extended ideas already existing, within small circles, to a range apparently boundless. How, then, it may be asked, did the Christian world-religion contribute to throw ideas of clan life and impersonal character into the background?
The Christian conceptions of personal immortality, personal reward or punishment in a future state, must have contrasted curiously with the usual doctrines of clan ethics. We cannot here attempt to trace at any length the influence of this individualism on barbarian feelings; we need only observe how largely it must have contributed to strengthen such sentiments of personal independence as had been developed among the tribal chiefs before Christianity became known to them. As in the two social lives of early Greece brought before us by the contrast of Homer with Hesiod—the life of the chiefs splendid with heroic ideals and personal prowess, the life of the villagers oppressed with poverty and toil—we find
